The Java Virtual Appliance—
No OS Required
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March 2008 CWP1516E0207-2B
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
Contents
Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
Virtualization: understanding the basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
BEA takes virtualization to the next level for Java applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
New levels of business agility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Cost reduction and improved ROI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Greater optimization through bottom-up enablement: BEA LiquidVM
™
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
Greater manageability through top-down control: BEA Liquid Operations Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Virtualization: What it means for SOA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
About BEA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
Join the BEA community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
Overview
With corporate data centers at or near their physical limit, virtualization is fast emerging as the best way to
meet the growing demand for computing capacity. Adding physical capacity isn’t a fast, easy, or readily scala-
ble option. Sometimes it’s hardly an option at all: building new data centers takes too long and costs too
much, and new hardware technologies are outstripping the power and cooling capabilities of existing data cen-
ters. But most servers typically run at less than 10 percent of capacity-which means that currently, there’s $140
billion in excess server capacity installed worldwide. For many companies, the fastest and most cost-effective
way to expand computing capacity is simply to make use of their idle processing capability. This realization is
driving a huge increase in the number of companies turning to virtualization
1
.
Virtualization, a set of technologies that helps IT run more applications on a given set of servers, can dramati-
cally increase utilization of existing capacity-and could enable businesses to leverage their current hardware to
meet their needs for years to come. This boosts business’s return on investment in hardware and data center
facilities. Even more important, virtualization enables IT to make immediate, incremental changes to capacity to
meet dynamic business needs-without incurring new costs-by provisioning or migrating applications in real
time.
Companies of all sizes are enthusiastically adopting virtualization. In March 2007, an IDC study estimated that
in 2006, virtualization had been adopted by 38 percent of medium-sized companies (fewer than 1000 employ-
ees), 67 percent of large companies (1,000-9,999 employees), and 72 percent of very large companies
(10,000+ employees). In a recent Forrester survey, respondents who had already implemented virtualization
estimated that it had saved them more than 23 percent in server space, power, and cooling costs
2
.
Now, companies that want to virtualize their Java application infrastructure can achieve unprecedented levels of
optimization and efficiency, while reducing hardware costs and ongoing operations management expenses.
BEA’s approach is to apply virtualization concepts traditionally used at the server level to the software layers,
pooling the resources of the Java runtime stack and applying automation principles. This results in even greater
efficiency, higher utilization, and greater cost savings.
1
1. IDC, March 2007
2. IDC 2007
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
Virtualization: understanding the basics
Virtualization requires adding a new layer, called a virtualization hypervisor, to the stack. A hypervisor is a pro-
gram that runs on top of the hardware and plays host to one or more virtual machines, each of which can be
home to a “guest operating system.” This enables multiple operating systems (OSs)—whether different OSs or
multiple instances of the same OS-to share a single hardware processor or processor complex. The hypervisor
can make a single server appear as many. Also, to reduce apparent complexity, it can hide the physical charac-
teristics of computing resources from the other systems, applications, or end users who interact with those
resources. Server virtualization conceals the characteristics of underlying hardware (everything below the OS)
and allows each OS instance and the applications running on it to act as if they had dedicated hardware. When
one of the OS instances or respective applications crashes, it does not affect the other OSs or applications on
that hypervisor/server.
However, the hypervisor layer traditionally sits above the hardware’s OS, adding a layer of overhead.
Hypervisors are typically small (400-500 MB) and consist of a collection of device drivers, memory manage-
ment, and the logic to time-share the various stacks above them onto the hardware. In effect, a hypervisor is
a stripped-down OS in its own right. With traditional hypervisors, a function call inside the Java application has
to go through more layers to be executed on an actual CPU. The hypervisor’s swapping in and out of each
application’s state imposes additional overhead.
2
B a s i c S e r v e r
V i r t u a l i z a t i o n
Java App
Java App
Java App
Java App
Java Container
Java Container
Java Container
Java Container
Java VM
Java VM
Java VM
Java VM
OS
OS
OS
OS
OS
Server
Server
Hypervisor
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
BEA takes virtualization to the next level for
Java applications
BEA accelerates the virtualization trend with its radically new approach to virtualizing Java applications. BEA is
uniquely positioned to lead in this area, with its tradition of innovation and excellence in the Java infrastructure
market, Java Virtual Machine (JVM) technology, and its deep understanding of enterprise Java-level manage-
ment. Its vision and products are now transforming the virtualization of Java applications by enabling higher uti-
lization and efficiencies through a streamlined “Java OS,” and by delivering value that goes beyond server con-
solidation to dynamic provisioning.
Unlike any other vendor, BEA approaches Java virtualization with a strategy of both top-down control and bot-
tom-up enablement. BEA Liquid Operations Control
™
software provides top-down control by enabling automated
provisioning and resource management with adaptive control for enterprise Java applications. BEA LiquidVM,
a virtualization-enabled version of BEA JRockit
®
, the world’s fastest JVM, supplies bottom-up enablement by
facilitating higher resource utilization at the JVM layer. It is the only JVM that can run on a next-generation
hypervisor without a standard OS, allowing Java applications to run directly on the virtualization layer. VMware’s
ESX Server, the first of these new hypervisors, doesn’t require an OS under it; instead it runs on the “bare
metal” of the server.
BEA’s approach of removing layers between the application and the “bare metal” of the server offers tremen-
dous benefits to companies that rely on Java applications to run their businesses, because it enables them to
deploy Java applications in a virtualized environment with a greatly reduced memory footprint. This streamlining
of OS functionality frees up key resources such as memory and disk space to enable even higher resource
utilization. Compared to standard virtual machines running the full OS and Java stack, the BEA approach
enables more applications to run on a given set of hardware to accomplish up to twice as much work.
3
N e x t - g e n e r a t i o n v i r t u a l i z a t i o n :
B E A L i q u i d V M
Java App
Java App
Java App
Java App
Java Container
Java Container
Java Container
Java Container
Java VM
OS
Server
Server
Hypervisor
BEA Liquid VM
BEA Liquid VM
BEA Liquid VM
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
New levels of business agility
Java virtualization delivers new levels of business agility-one of the main motivations for businesses considering
a virtualized approach. In a recent study, 92 percent of respondents rated increasing flexibility and speed of
making changes as “important” or “very important” factors in their decision to virtualize. Companies gain sub-
stantial flexibility from decoupling applications and their resource requirements from the runtime infrastructure
on which they are hosted. This enables IT to focus its efforts on defining the desired runtime characteristics.
Then, instead of spending time carefully preparing the infrastructure for the application, IT can count on
automation to deliver the required results.
BEA’s approach to Java virtualization supports business agility with a fully pre-installed and pre-configured
software environment—a virtual middleware appliance. With this appliance, provisioning new instances of the
application stack can take place in near-real time: just minutes or hours as opposed to the days or weeks that
have been the norm. IT can also migrate applications almost immediately, with minimal effort.
4
“It can take me three to six months to get a project off the ground, from conception to procurement, approval,
and installation. In a virtual world, it could take a day.”
Enterprise Strategic Architect at a major financial institution
“There is little doubt that the hottest trend in x86 servers is virtualization—becoming a default by 2009. Gartner
estimates that 40 percent of logical server demand is expected to be virtualized by this time. Extensive conver-
sations with a number of BEA customers have yet to find a customer that is NOT actively considering some
aspect of virtualization for their data center.”
Infrastructure Futures: Virtualized, Agile and Real-Time, Thomas Bittman, Gartner December 2006
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
Delivering on the promise: BEA product roadmap
BEA is the first vendor to deliver top-down, bottom-up enablement of virtualization for Java applications and
SOA services.
BEA LiquidVM, a hypervisor-enabled Java virtual machine, is available in a bundle called BEA WebLogic
Server
®
Virtual Edition, comprising BEA WebLogic Server and BEA LiquidVM. This product builds on the rock-
solid foundation of BEA WebLogic Server to enable Java applications to run more efficiently on virtualized hard-
ware. BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition will initially be supported on VMware’s ESX Server and the full
VMware Infrastructure product line with support for other virtualization technologies to follow.
Cost reduction and improved ROI
Companies can leverage virtualization to improve utilization of existing servers for cost reduction and improved
ROI. Also, because BEA’s approach eliminates the requirement for redundant copies of the OS, it results in a
significantly smaller footprint, enabling organizations to run more applications on the same machine-in some
cases, twice as many, according to BEA’s internal tests.
This has follow-on benefits: it reduces the hardware required to support a given number of applications, lowers
OS license and administrative costs, and reduces data center complexity. With BEA’s approach to Java virtual-
ization, IT can migrate to more cost-efficient hardware without recompiling or needing a new version of software.
5
Basic server virtualization
improves utilization to some
extent: the BEA LiquidVM
can double the number of
applications running on a sin-
gle physical server.
App
OS
Server
App
OS
App
OS
App
OS
App
App
App
App
App
App
App
App
App
OS
App
OS
Server
Server
Server
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
BEA Liquid Operations Control is management and control software for managing any Java application in a vir-
tualized or non-virtualized environment. Coming in Q3 2007, this technology will be available as BEA WebLogic
Liquid Operations Control. This product can allow for dynamic resource control of both BEA WebLogic-based
applications and standard Java applications capable of running on BEA LiquidVM.
Greater optimization through bottom-up enablement:
BEA LiquidVM
BEA LiquidVM eliminates each Java application’s OS just as the latest hypervisors like VMware ESX eliminate
the need for the hardware host’s OS. This removes two layers from the stack. LiquidVM—a virtualization-
enabled edition of BEA JRockit, the world’s fastest JVM-is the first and only JVM that can run on hypervisor-
enabled x86 servers without a standard OS, so that Java applications can run directly on the virtualization layer.
This streamlining of OS functionality enables even higher resource utilization. Compared to standard virtual
machines running the full OS and Java stack, up to twice the number of virtual machine containers can run
BEA LiquidVM instances on a single server.
Just as the hypervisor-enabled hardware implements only the OS functionality it needs, BEA LiquidVM imple-
ments certain functions directly and depends on the hypervisor for others. BEA LiquidVM on its own can
replace the majority of the code in a virtual server. Less code means less management and improved stability
and security.
OS Functions in BEA LiquidVM
OS Functions in Hypervisor
OS Functions Not Implemented
• File I/O
• Hardware-specific
• GUI functionality
• Memory Management
device drivers
• Other devices (e.g. printers)
• Thread Management
6
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
Greater manageability through top-down control: BEA
Liquid Operations Control
BEA Liquid Operations Control is software designed to provide significant management benefits for all Java
applications in a non-virtualized or virtualized environment-not just those running on BEA LiquidVM or BEA
WebLogic Server
®
. The BEA Liquid Operations Control console provides visibility into runtime behavior of appli-
cations and a dynamic, integrated information and action framework for managing Java applications and virtu-
alized server resources.
With BEA Liquid Operations Control, IT can provision Java applications on virtualized Java infrastructure. The
applications will not have to have any knowledge of the underlying resources, they will simply “ask” BEA Liquid
Operations Control to provision them according to a standardized set of parameters describing their needs,
such as computing power, memory, and quality of service.
This approach puts control into the BEA Liquid Operations Control resource broker, which supports policy-driv-
en automation of provisioning tasks, relieves applications of the details needed to run, and frees infrastructure
to be dynamically reconfigured and re-optimized. Without this capability, IT would have to take the time to con-
figure each application manually.
7
BEA WebLogic Liquid
Operations Control hides
complexity and enables
dynamic resource provisioning
for Java applications.
BEA Liquid VM
BEA Liquid VM
Liquid Operations
Control
Hypervisor
Controller
Java App
Java App
Java App
Java Container
Java Container
Java Container
Java VM
Hypervisor
OS
Server
Server
Server
Server
BEA White Paper – The Java Virtual Appliance—No OS Required
Virtualization: what it means for SOA
BEA’s approach to Java virtualization fits well with its longstanding leadership in providing IT infrastructures that
empower organizations to achieve “Business LiquidITy
™
”, a state in which IT assets are freed up and made more
flexible in order to deliver maximum value. Virtualization is the latest way in which BEA enables Business LiquidITy.
BEA’s virtualization solutions are a key component of its unique approach to Service-Oriented Architecture,
called BEA
®
Enterprise 360˚. This approach promotes re-use of application service assets to reduce cost of
development and aims to achieve business agility through a flexible, extensible computing paradigm.
Virtualization embodies this computing paradigm, delivering cost efficiencies, improved utilization, and dynamic
scaling.
BEA’s virtualization solutions support BEA’s “liquid” vision by liquefying enterprise IT assets from the bottom of
the software stack all the way up through SOA components and services. SOA 360° spans the three BEA
product families-BEA AquaLogic
®
, BEA WebLogic
®
, and BEA Tuxedo
®
. It encompasses unified tooling through
BEA WorkSpace 360
™
, unified architecture through BEA microService Architecture
™
, and preemptive support
through BEA Guardian
™
.
BEA is uniquely positioned as a leader in the enterprise Java world. With its innovative and high-performance
approach to virtualization, BEA is not just keeping up with virtualization-it’s accelerating it, to the benefit of
every business running Java applications.
About BEA
BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA
®
Enterprise 360°,
the industry’s most advanced SOA-based offering, is a comprehensive approach to delivering business results
that includes technology, professional services, best practices, and world-class partners. Information about how
BEA helps customers build a Liquid Enterprise
™
that transforms their business can be found at
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8
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